UPHEAVAL IN THE EAST

UPHEAVAL IN THE EAST; Pollution's Toll in Eastern Europe: Stumps Where Great Trees Once Grew

By MARLISE SIMONS, Special to The New York Times

Published: March 19, 1990

LITVINOV, Czechoslovakia—
Across a mountain range where East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland meet lies the bitter fallout from industrial schemes conceived in the Kremlin four decades ago.

Barren plateaus stretch for miles, studded with the stumps and skeletons of pine trees. Under the snow lie thousands of acres of poisoned ground, where for centuries thick forests had grown.

This is the heart of Europe, the sick heart of Europe, its people call it. Below these mountains, in a broad belt from Leipzig in East Germany to Cracow in southern Poland and across northern Czechoslovakia, are the bulk of Eastern Europe's heavy industries. A phalanx of power plants stands beside them, spewing smoke heavy with sulfur and soot as they drive steel and chemical works and heat homes.

Clouds of Brown Smoke

In the rush to compete with the West, the three countries have stoked these plants with millions of tons of lignite, a geologically younger coal that is dirty, cheap and abundant here. (Just 10 percent of the coal mined and burned in the United States is lignite.) The hunt for cheap energy has come back to haunt the planners: the brown coal smoke and other noxious emissions have wreaked havoc on buildings, penetrated people's lungs and poured acid rain over farmlands and forests.

As post-Communist Eastern Europe is taking stock of the impact of callous industrial rampage, at least a dozen cities in this grime belt are vying for the title of being Europe's most polluted place.

''Basically we are seeing an ecological catastrophe,'' said Frantisek Urban, director of nature conservation in Czechoslovakia's eight-week-old Ministry of Environment.

Where Forests Disappear

While acid rain damage to forests from car and industrial exhausts all over Western Europe has been reported for more than a decade, forestry experts meeting in Prague last week said no other place had such an extent of forest deaths in central Europe's industrial belt. They cited a stretch of some 350 miles where more than 300,000 acres of forest had disappeared and surviving trees were so sick their life span would be short.

Winds churn the sulfurous air around this ''Bermuda Triangle of pollution,'' as the foresters dubbed it, and carry this over long distances.

With prevailing winds blowing east, Czechs blame East Germans for half their pollution and Poles blame both neighbors for as much. Poland's fallout is also felt in the Ukraine and in Sweden.

A trip along the crest of the Erz Mountains, at the Czechoslovak border with East Germany, and over the Riesen and Sudeten Mountains of southern Poland, illustrated the results of production pressures from Moscow. In village after village, foresters in Poland and Czechoslovakia said they had warned of the widespread deaths of trees for almost 20 years.

Thick Brown Haze

A thick brown haze hung over much of north Czechoslovakia, something people described as normal for eight months of the year. It took on the sting of tear gas between Usti and Chomutov on the edge of the vast brown coal basin of northern Bohemia. The basin maintains 10 power plants.

In just the last few years, Czechs said the country had spent a fortune on Soviet desulfurization scrubbers. ''We were promised 80 percent efficiency, but they are continuously breaking down,'' Mr. Urban, in Prague, had lamented. ''When they work, they clean only 30 percent.''

Usti, lying black in its own sticky soot, spews carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur and heavy metals from chemical, glass and cooking oil plants. Sulfur in the air here has been reported at 20 times the permissible level.

Jaroslav Jirgle, who heads Usti's modest Research Institute for Forestry and Game Management, took a visitor through the region's bedraggled forests. These had been dense woods, known from the chronicles of the Napoleonic wars when Russian, French and Austrian armies clashed here.

Conifers, exposed all year round, suffer most, said the forester, explaining that the emissions clog the pores of the needles, damage the wax, and interfere with their breathing. Trees that survived grew to less than a quarter of their healthy size and died early instead of living a normal 80 to 100 years.

On top of the Erz Mountains, the undulating tablelands, now covered in snow, bore only stumps and barren stems as though a great fire had raged.

Some experimental patches now bore seedlings of sitka spruce, a hardy North American type. ''Who knows if they can stand this,'' said Mr. Jirgle, explaining that down to the south were the plants of Litvinov and ahead lay Dresden and East Germany's industrial basin, which has 18 coal-fueled power plants.

Beyond the forest death, the pollution has unchained a far more complex range of damage along the Erz, Riesen and Tatry Mountains.

Alfred Shima, an agronomist at Usti, said soil in the region was extremely acid, with a pH between 4 and 3 - a point at which the aluminum trapped in the clay is released. Other specialists said the aluminum was poisoning the groundwater, killing tree and plant roots and filtering into drinking water.

With the trees gone, birds of prey have disappeared, triggering a plague of mountain mice. The large mice are chewing up the seedlings.